Chemical Bonds

Abstract

A funny thing happened on the way to this year’s [1981] Nobel Prizes in Science. The chemistry award honoured two men who used quantum mechanics—the bedrock of modern physics—to explain how molecules form. And the physics award went to three researchers who discovered how to read the chemical signatures of such complex mixtures as pollutants and rust. But if the $180 000 prizes announced last week showed that physics and chemistry meet in the subatomic world, they also suggested that Eastern and Western science recently have been poles apart. The work of Japanese scientist Kenichi Fukui, who shared the chemistry award with Cornell University chemist Roald Hoffmann, went largely unappreciated in his own country. ‘The Japanese are very conservative when it comes to new theory,’ he said last week. ‘But once you get appreciated in the US or Europe, then the appreciation spreads back to Japan.’